Showalter

Showalter, From David Lodge to David Brent? Times Higher Education -

Over the past 50 years, the faculty novel, or Professorroman, has offered a social history of the university as well as a spiritual, political and psychological guide to its professional culture. I called my personal take / Faculty Towers / , in reference both to Trollope's / Barchester Towers / , the archetypal Victorian clerical novel; and to the archetypal TV series / Fawlty Towers / , about an irascible and deluded hotel owner. Now / Faculty Towers / , revised for British readers, is being published by Oxford University Press.
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This would update the campus-election plot created by C. P. Snow but bring it into connection with the management styles of the 21st-century university. As Lodge commented recently on / Changing Places / , the differences between American and English higher education are no longer as stark and funny as they were in the 1960s: "The two systems have drawn closer together: American universities have become less euphoric places, English universities more competitive, as have the countries to which they belong." But those changes could also be subjects of a new academic fiction, even if the common room now resembles / The Office / and assistant professors are as cutthroat as the contestants in / The Apprentice / .